Timeless
by damnedscribblingwoman
Summary: Hermione would like to think that she was old enough and mature enough to have a handle on her temper, only clearly she didn't, because it was 1991 and she was eleven. Again. Over a stupid slur and Pansy Parkinson being her predictably spiteful self.
1. The Club

**Originally written for the Harry Potter Threesomes Gift Exchange.**

* * *

Pansy Parkinson and Hermione Granger had never got along. Not as little girls at Hogwarts, not as young women in a world gone up in flames, and not even after the war, when the whole wizarding community had collectively decided to just pretend the past few years had never happened and that they all lived in a brave new world in which old prejudices were gone and old enmities forgotten. One did not remark on people's blood status (not where one could be overhead, at any rate), one did not look down on the lower classes (or not openly, if one could help it), and one never, ever mentioned the war.

But even the new status quo — which had produced such strange visions as Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter being civil, even friendly, to one another — had not been enough to bring about anything but icy, barely-civil civility between Pansy Parkinson and Hermione Granger. It was all very well for Draco to play nice after the whole Death Mark debacle, but Pansy had not been that much of a fool and she saw no profit in sucking up to the aggravating, pretentious, know-it-all Muggle-born who fancied herself a war hero.

Had Hermione been asked for her opinion on Pansy, it was unlikely to have been any more flattering, so it was fortunate that they did not tend to run in the same circles.

When Pansy saw her in the crowded club, it was more than a little unexpected — and not just because it was a Muggle club (surely the odds of finding a Muggle-born in a Muggle club had to be higher than those of finding a pure-blood, let alone two), but also because it was not the sort of place where one would expect to find someone who until very recently had been very publicly involved with Ronald Weasley.

Pansy had pushed her way to the bar, flushed and out of breath. She tried to get the bartender's attention, grinning when Daphne pressed her body against hers and kissed the side of her neck. She turned towards her, the need for water forgotten as she kissed the other woman, letting her hands follow the curves of her body and around her back, pulling her closer against her.

The world was made of flashing lights and loud music and Daphne's warm lips and soft body and clever hands, and just then Pansy needed nothing else. A tap on her shoulder got her attention and she pulled back, turning towards the impatient bartender and yelling her request for two bottles of water, just managing to make herself heard. When the sound dimmed around her, she didn't need to see Daphne discreetly putting her wand away.

"Let's get out of here," Daphne whispered in her ear before nibbling on it, letting her hands do the job of persuading Pansy. And Pansy, who didn't need much in the way of persuasion, was about to agree when her gaze fell on the woman leaning against the bar a few feet away. Feeling her girlfriend tense up, Daphne pulled back and followed the direction of her gaze, immediately spotting Hermione.

"What is _she_ doing here?"

Pansy chuckled. "What do you think?" The Gryffindor looked awkward and ill at ease, making stilted conversation over the loud music with a woman whose only redeeming quality seemed to be her immunity to Granger's pathetic lack of game. Pansy's smile widened as an idea crossed her mind. "Daph," she started.

"Don't even think about it."

She pouted, her hands on Daphne's hips, her fingers trailing the skin just above the waist of her jeans. "It's my turn to choose," she pointed out.

"Yes, but I have veto power."

"But why not?" She let just the hint of a whine into her voice, leaning forward and kissing Daphne's neck, feeling more than hearing her laugh. "It would be fun."

"Because you're bent on mischief."

That's why it would be fun.

She turned Daphne so they were both looking at Granger and wrapped her arms around her waist, hooking her head over her shoulder. "Just think about it," she said, her voice soft and low, almost a purr. "How many people can say they've slept with a war hero?" Far too many, really. War heroes were a dime a dozen these days.

"There's a special kind of hell for people who pick on baby lesbians."

She huffed a laugh. "Who's picking on anyone? I'm the very soul of charity. That girl is wound so tight she might just sprain something. It would be a kindness, really."

"Panse…"

"Come on. Aren't you a little tempted?" And it _was_ tempting. Hermione had certainly filled out in all the right places, and Pansy was not so much a snob that she was blind, but that was nothing to the dark glee she felt at the thought of stripping away the carefully-kept control of that insufferable, self-important upstart, make her come apart under her, get her to moan her name…

Not the noblest of reasons to sleep with someone, perhaps, but it wasn't as if Hermione Granger would ever have suspected her of anything resembling nobility.

Daphne cocked her head back and pressed a soft kiss to her lips. "Even if you can convince me," she said, and Pansy took it as tacit agreement, "you'll never convince her."

"You give me too little credit."

A quick wave of her wand was all it took for Granger's friend to find herself with a sudden urge to depart without so much as another word or glance at her companion. Hermione looked after her with a stricken expression that suddenly turned to alarm when Pansy and Daphne got close enough for her to be in the radius of Daphne's sound-dampening spell.

The witch — who had hardly been relaxed before — visibly stiffened, and while Pansy could not see it, she had no doubt Hermione's hand was hovering just above the place where she kept her wand. What did the little fool think? That they'd attack her in a place packed with Muggles? Gryffindors were always so melodramatic.

"Small world, Granger." Pansy leaned against the bar, next to the witch, standing just a little too close.

"What are you doing here?"

Daphne's smirk spoke volumes about what she thought Pansy's chances were, which was almost insulting. Daphne should know by now that what Pansy wanted, Pansy got.

"Same thing you are, really," she said. Daphne nestled against her, and Pansy draped an arm around her shoulders. "Dancing, drinking…" She reached out to Hermione and tucked a curl behind her hair, adding, "Looking for company." The woman started slightly, turning three different shades of red. In anyone else it would have been endearing.

"You _have_ company," she pointed out, trying to cover her embarrassment with a frown.

"The more the merrier," Daphne said, and then, because despite popular opinion she really was the evil one in their relationship, she turned Pansy's face towards her and kissed her — a languid, hot, utterly shameless kiss. When Daphne pulled back, her grin had a wicked edge to it and Hermione was looking even more flustered, something Pansy wouldn't have thought possible. She also looked ready to bolt, which meant she wouldn't. Gryffindors were nothing if not predictable.

Pansy got the attention of one of the bartenders, a short brunette with a nose ring, and ordered three shots of tequila, which made Hermione go from embarrassed to suspicious in two seconds flat.

"What in Merlin's name are you doing, Parkinson?"

"Buying you a drink."

"Why are you buying me a drink?"

"Peace offering." She did no try for contrition — it had never been a good look on her. She smiled instead, a smile that was all sharp edges and barely-disguised amusement. It was a challenge poorly-disguised as a smile, and Hermione reacted exactly as Pansy expected her to, by reaching for the shot glass closest to her without breaking eye contact and throwing it back, making a face at the taste. Daphne chuckled next to her, and Pansy smirked. Gryffindors.

* * *

Hermione was really smart. She was really smart and she knew when she was being played. She knew and it should have mattered, only clearly it didn't, because she was in the middle of the crowded dance floor, dancing with Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass, and if someone had told fifteen-year-old Hermione that that was something that was going to happen, that that was something in her future, she would have called them an idiot. Only now it seemed that _she_ was the idiot, because she was the one dancing with Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass.

And she'd love to blame it on the three shots of tequila, or the however-many beers she'd had before that, but while she was drunk enough that she was dancing with Pansy-Pure-Bloods-Should-Rule-The-World-Parkinson and Daphne-What-Is-A-Muggle-Born-Greengrass, she was also drunk enough to be painfully honest with herself. And she honest-to-god wasn't hating this turn of events. She should be — she was painfully aware of that — but she wasn't. She didn't hate the way their bodies brushed against hers; she didn't hate the small, casual touches. When Pansy buried a hand in her hair and pulled her in for a kiss, she certainly did not hate _that_.

The whole world was moving just at the edge of her vision, moving bodies flashing in and out of the existence with the strobe lights, and Hermione felt light-headed and slightly adrift, grounded only by the solid pressure of the women on either side of her.

Daphne pressed against her back, a soft, stable presence, her lips warm where they followed the curve of her neck, sending shivers down her spine, and when she nibbled on the soft skin where her neck met her shoulder, Hermione practically purred into Pansy's mouth, and it was a good thing everything around them was so incredibly loud, because _that_ certainly would have been embarrassing. And then Daphne tugged on her hair, and Hermione tilted her head back, finding her mouth with hers, and she was lost to what was or wasn't embarrassing, neither knowing nor caring to find out.

And there was a part of her who bristled at the very notion of being there, in the middle of that dance floor, making out with Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass — a part of her who remembered only too well the sneers and the scorn and the snide remarks, who did not forget the little girl who'd shed angry tears over the cutting words thrown at her by them and people like them. But a different part of her remembered too the woman who'd stood by herself earlier in the evening — unsure, uncertain and lost — and who'd been only too glad to reach out to someone familiar, even if that happened to be them.

And then, of course, there was the part of her who could barely string two coherent thoughts together anymore, whose whole world had dwarfed to the way their bodies felt against hers, to the way their lips and tongues and hands felt on her, and to the realisation that giving in was as easy as breathing.

When Pansy tugged on her arm and led the way back to the bar, Hermione looked over her shoulder and reached back to grab Daphne's hand. She was faintly aware of the noise dimming around them — the result of either Pansy's or Daphne's magic — and wondered briefly whether the Muggle bartender was also aware of it when Pansy leaned in to order three B-52s.

Letting go of Hermione's hand, Daphne looped her arms around Pansy's waist and yelled at the bartender to forget about the shots and just bring them three waters. Pansy pouted, turning to face Daphne, who laughed at her despondent expression before kissing her. The kiss started out soft and teasing before growing increasingly heated, and Hermione felt a sharp pang of something she refused to identify as jealousy, because she wasn't that much of a fool. Not yet. Not ever.

But maybe it was as good a time as any to make a hasty retreat. She'd come, she'd seen, she'd made ill-advised, alcohol-fuelled decisions. Veni, vidi… What was Latin for ill-advised?

Hermione glanced around and took an hesitant step in the general direction of what might or might not be the exit, but there was no time like the present to find out, because her presence had clearly become superfluous, and it was just as well, really. She had made plenty of bad life choices for one evening so the smart thing to do was clearly to—

A hand on her arm halted her half-hearted escape attempt, and Hermione forgot to be smart as Pansy pulled her back towards them. She sighed contently as she kissed her, all thoughts of exits and common sense and better life choices gone. And after all, it hadn't been her smarts landing her in Gryffindor House so much as her ability to make reckless, misguided decisions at the slightest provocation. Fred and George would be proud.

Just as the thought crossed her mind, she was hit by the realisation that Fred and George couldn't be anything at all. Not anymore. Not ever again. Hermione froze as the club disappeared around her, replaced by stone walls and bouncing curses, and the smell of smoke and charred flesh. Grotesque figures flashed in and out of the existence, and people were screaming and running and dying in hallways and stairwells and classrooms — broken bodies that would never be put back together again.

A warm hand cupped her face, bringing her back to the present. "You still with us, Granger?" Pansy was frowning slightly, her thumb brushing over her skin.

Hermione forced herself to smile, forced her body to relax. "Sorry, just spaced out for a second there." She was fine. It was fine. The war was over. It was all over. And she was fine. She was absolutely fine.

A mischievous smile spread across Pansy's face. "How about we move this party elsewhere?"

But Daphne was still frowning, a troubled expression on her face as she ran a hand over Hermione's hair.

"How about we call it a night instead?" she said. "We all had a lot to drink."

Part of Hermione warmed at the tone of concern, and part of her couldn't help but feel a sharp sting of rejection, something she wasn't even going to analyse, because what the hell. She made herself smile, the sort of smile that came so naturally to Pansy — easy and charming, a little cocky, a little sharp — and wrapped her free arm around Daphne's waist.

"Are you protecting my virtue, Greengrass?"

Daphne's smile was soft and friendly and a little amused. "You're extremely drunk, Granger."

Slytherins looking out for Gryffindors. It really was a brave new world.

"I'm not that drunk," she said, closing the space between them and kissing her, soft and sweet and enticing. And part of her knew she wasn't enough to tempt Daphne Greengrass, and part of her thought Daphne Greengrass should be so lucky, because she was Hermione Granger, and Muggle-born or not, she was totally a catch. And part of her recognised that she really was that drunk. Drunk enough to think this was a good idea, and sober enough to know it wasn't, and enough of a fool not to care either way.

When Daphne kissed her back, all the loud voices vying for Hermione's attention inside her head went quiet.


	2. The Ministry

Hermione was an idiot. Smartest witch of her age, sure. But an idiot, nonetheless. She was an idiot who made poor life choices and shouldn't be allowed out in the world where bad life choices could be made. And dating Ron had been bad enough. There was no conceivable reason why she should have felt the need to top that by sleeping with Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass.

And yet.

And if she was going to sleep with two (!) pure-bloods who had never said a civil word to her in six years at Hogwarts or in any of the time since, or whose loyalties had been sketchy at best during the war, couldn't she at least have picked someone she didn't have to see on a daily basis?

All three of them worked at the Ministry (because every other wizard seemed to. Someone should really look into that), but Hermione hadn't really noticed them much before. The Ministry was a big place, and they all worked in different departments: Hermione was a curse-breaker with the Auror Office, Pansy worked as a special assistant to the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, and Daphne worked in the Department of Mysteries, doing… Actually, Hermione wasn't sure what Daphne did. The Department of Mysteries lived up to its name, and no one seemed to be entirely sure what Unspeakables did, except that it was probably best not to ask too many questions. Something about jars full of brains.

They all worked there, and Hermione had never had much cause to notice them beyond a brief, "I wonder who Parkinson is terrorising these days." Daphne hadn't even merited that much thought, mostly because she hadn't spent nearly as much time as Pansy during their formative years being a complete nightmare to anyone she deemed inferior to herself — and on Pansy's Scale of Social Solecisms, being a middle-class, Muggle-born Gryffindor was probably pretty close to the bottom. Hell, it probably _was_ the bottom.

Hermione did notice them now, however, and she really wish she didn't. It was difficult to say what rankled most. Daphne's complete indifference or Pansy's knowing smirk. Whatever. Hermione didn't care. She could do casual sex as well as the next idiot who went around sleeping with completely inappropriate people. Really.

And if Parkinson gave her one more smug grin, she was going to find herself on the receiving end of an Unforgivable.

Because they worked in different departments, they normally only saw each other in passing in the lobby or in the lifts, but the universe hated Hermione, so it only took a few days for her to find herself in a conference room with both of them. Because of course she did.

A team of Aurors had located what had once been a Death Eater stronghold. It was empty now, save for a ridiculously and needlessly intricate web of curses, hexes and jinxes that protected what the Auror Office could only speculate was a large — and no doubt dangerous — collection of dark artifacts. The whole thing was a death trap — both too dangerous to dismantle and too dangerous to let be — and had it been up to Hermione, she would have set the whole thing on fire. It was not up to her, however.

The Ministry was only too happy to employ the Golden Trio, but it was one thing to parade them where important people could see them and a very different one to take seriously the opinions of "kids barely out of school". Never mind the fact that they had fought a four-year war and orchestrated the downfall of the most dangerous wizard that had ever lived. It was peace time now, and war symbols were meant to be seen and not heard.

No, she wasn't bitter.

The conference room was packed. Sitting around the table were the heads of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, of the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes and of the Department of Mysteries, as well as the Minister for Magic himself and the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot. Standing behind them were numerous Aurors, Unspeakables, curse-breakers, clerks and all manner of specialists — a solid ninety per cent of which were "kids barely out of school" who were expected to put their neck on the line for whatever crackpot plan the Ministry came up with in their quest to add to their precious collection of dangerous magical artifacts. (No other Magical Ministry had such a great collection. Theirs was the best collection. Suck on that, Hungary.)

Nope. Not bitter at all.

One day Hermione was going to be Minister for Magic and there would be a charming little bonfire with the contents of the Ministry vaults. She could wait. She had a ten-year plan. A ten-year plan she was currently focusing on right now, because it was either that or hexing the crap out of Parkinson, whose amused smirk was getting really old and who really needed to stop looking at Hermione as if she'd seen her naked. Which she had, but that was entirely besides the point. And if she thought for a moment that she could get under her skin, she was sorely mistaken. The day was yet to come when Hermione Granger could be rattled by the likes of—

"Granger, are we boring you?"

The harsh tone of Arnold Peasegood, Head of the Auror Office, startled her out of her musings. "Sir, no, sir. Sorry, sir."

"The list, girl." He snapped his fingers and held out a hand expectantly. Hermione handed him the scroll, keeping her face carefully blank.

Peasegood opened the scroll on the table. "These are the people on the task force. If your name is on the list, you are to report to the Auror Office at zero nine-hundred tomorrow. Abbott, Granger, Hopkins, McDougal, Mcmillan, Potter, Thomas, Turpin and Weasley."

Pansy was no longer smiling.

"Arnie, I can't help but notice that's not the list we agreed on." Sarah Croaker was a plump witch in her forties, who looked more like someone's favourite aunt than the head of a department that kept a collection of pickled brains.

"The Auror Office made some changes, Sally."

"The Auror Office does not pick and choose within my department," she said pleasantly. "No offence to Turpin, here. She's smart as a whip and a credit to the department, but I want Greengrass on this."

"Unspeakable Greengrass does not have the security clearance." There were no former Slytherins on the list, nor any pure-bloods who hadn't fought in the war — and on the right side of it. No one whose loyalties could be considered suspect.

Daphne met Hermione's gaze — something like hurt flashing across her face — and then looked away, her expression a blank mask that gave away nothing.

Pansy was openly fuming.

"Everyone who works for me has been thoroughly vetted, and I resent—"

"Unspeakable Croaker," the Minister interrupted. "The Auror Office has final say on any security-related matters."

Sarah Croaker looked thoughtfully at Kingsley Shacklebolt for a few seconds, and then smiled — an open, charming, utterly terrifying smile. The smile of someone who had access to an army of disembodied brains.

"As you say, Minister," she agreed cheerfully, and if Hermione were Kingsley, she'd sleep with an eye open from now on.

The meeting wrapped up not long after that. They had their instructions; there was little else to be said. As people filed out of the conference room, Hermione glanced after Daphne's receding form, something like guilt churning in her stomach. And it was ridiculous to feel guilty. She followed orders, like everyone there. And she didn't owe Daphne a thing. And what's more, if more members of the ruling pure-blood families had bothered to take a stand against the tyrant bent on wiping out half the wizarding population and ruling over the other half, maybe they'd be looked at with less suspicion now. She really couldn't be blamed for—

Pansy walked out of the room behind her, knocking into her in passing and giving her a murderous look before following after Daphne.

"Hermione, you coming?" Harry looked at her, expectantly. "We need to go over the protocols."

"Yeah, I'll just—" Hermione glanced from Harry back to the the other end of the corridor, where Pansy had just disappeared, and back to Harry. "I'll meet you guys there. There's something I need to take care of."

And without giving him time to object, she took off after Pansy and Daphne, because she was just as capable of making bad decisions sober as she was drunk.

She had lost sight of both of them, but it didn't take a genius to know where Daphne would have headed, and it wasn't long before Hermione caught sight of Pansy's purple robes. When the witch ducked into one of the side entrances to the Department of Mysteries, Hermione followed, not once thinking that was a bad idea. She had been friends with Harry and Ron for so long that her perception of good and bad ideas was a little skewed.

She had only been in the Department of Mysteries the one time — a night she had tried very hard to forget — but she didn't recognise most of the rooms and corridors she walked through. The place was like a maze — an eerily silent and deserted maze — and Hermione would have lost her way if it weren't for the occasional glimpse of Pansy or the sound of the odd door being open.

When she finally caught up with them, it was in a large, brightly-lit room filled with hundreds upon hundreds of clocks — big clocks, small clocks, hourglasses, sundials, even the odd digital clock. They were scattered across desks, displayed in locked cabinets, hanging from the walls, and there were even some hanging from the ceiling. There were also time-turners — more than Hermione had noticed the first time she had been in the room, and certainly more than she expected to see now, considering the whole Ministry stock had officially been destroyed during the Battle of the Department of Mysteries.

Daphne crossed her arms over her chest, her eyes red and puffy. "You can't be here," she said to Pansy, her voice a little off. When she spotted Hermione, her expression hardened. "Neither can you."

Pansy spun around, drawing her wand. "Did you lose your way, Granger?" It was Pansy as she remembered her from Hogwarts — haughty and disdainful, a little catty, a little vicious. "How safe do you figure you are, all alone down here with the likes of us?"

Hermione was fairly confident Parkinson wouldn't hex her. Not on Ministry property, anyway. Too many awkward questions.

Daphne sniffled once before looking away, the very picture of misery.

Hermione was fairly confident that if Parkinson _did_ try to hex her, she could probably draw fast enough to shield it.

"You don't scare me, Pansy," she said, because it was mostly true. To Daphne, she added, "It's not a reflection on your work."

Daphne laughed, a bitter, humourless chuckle, and looked up at Hermione.

"No. It's just a reflection on me."

And there was something about the way she said it that tugged at all the parts of Hermione that wanted to reach out to her and make it better, which was a ridiculous impulse that Hermione was not going to examine too closely, because that way lay madness.

"If it were up to me—"

"Oh, do tell, Granger." Pansy's smile did not reach her eyes. "How hard did you argue that particular point? How hard did the sanctimonious Hermione Granger try to keep a pure-blood on that list?"

Hermione could feel herself blush and she hated that she was. She had done nothing to be ashamed of. "Fuck you, Parkinson. There _are_ pure-bloods on that list."

"Sure. The right kind of pure-bloods. Dutiful little soldiers who grovelled enough or bled enough for saint Potter."

"The bar isn't as high as that. Though we did try to weed out any who tried to hand him over to Lord Voldemort."

The words were out before she could bite them back. Daphne flinched at the name, but Pansy only blanched, looking for a second as if Hermione had slapped her. And then she smiled, slow and dangerous, a picture of natural grace and easy poise.

"Ah, but you should know I'm a reformed character now." The sharp edge to her voice was at odds with her relaxed appearance. "I even pity fuck the occasional Mudblood for cookie points."

Hermione did not even register drawing her wand. "Stupefy!" she yelled, anger overriding common sense.

"Protego!"

Time slowed down and it was almost as if Hermione could see it all happening in slow motion. Daphne yelled a warning right before Hermione's spell hit Pansy's shield. It bounced off it and hit the closest table, smashing it and everything on it and sending glass and wood flying in all directions. Hermione turned her face away instinctively, and barely had time to feel the sharp sting of glass embedding itself on her skin before the whole world changed.

The Great Hall exploded to life around her, bright and loud and impossible, decked in the House colours, packed full of boisterous students. She stared at the dais, where Albus Dumbledore stood next to the Sorting Hat, and it was all Hermione could do not to start hyperventilating.


	3. The School

No, no, no, no. This was bad. This was really, really bad. Daphne stared around her in horror, but her mind refused to even process what she was seeing except to recoil at the utter wrongness of it. She was faintly aware of the fact that she was breathing too fast, but there was nothing she could do about it, nothing she could do except freak out, because this was really, extremely, overwhelmingly bad.

A warm hand squeezed hers and she forced herself to focus on Pansy, except that was a mistake, because Pansy was also wrong. The whole world was wrong, and she didn't know what to do. She didn't know what to do, she didn't know how to fix it, and this was just really, really bad.

"Shhhh," Pansy said, moving a little closer, shielding Daphne from the other students around them. "It's okay, baby. Just breathe. Everything's fine."

Everything was not fine. Everything was very much not fine. And Pansy's voice — so much higher, so much younger than it should have been — was doing nothing to help Daphne's growing anxiety. She bit back a sob, closing her eyes for a second, trying and failing to think of something, anything to fix what had just happened.

McGonagall's voice cut through the haze of panic. "Granger, Hermione," she called.

Daphne looked frantically around until she found Hermione, who looked so much different from the Hermione who'd stood in the Time Room only a few seconds ago. This Hermione — small and scared and far too young — was staring back at her with the same horror Daphne felt. Except there was no time — there was no time for panic or to freak out, which was kind of funny, all things considered, their problem being a lack of time. Daphne nodded in the direction of the dais, trying to convey to Hermione that she really needed to start moving.

"Granger, Hermione," McGonagall repeated, which hadn't happened the first time around, and they really couldn't be messing with this. Daphne frowned and nodded towards the dais again, and Hermione seemed to finally get it, because she moved at long last, walking up to the stool over which McGonagall was holding the Sorting Hat.

"Pansy, listen to me," Daphne said under her breath, knowing she didn't have very long. "Change nothing. Everything has to happen exactly like it did the first time around."

"But—"

"Greengrass, Daphne."

Daphne did not wait to be called again. She let go of Pansy, squared her shoulders and forced herself to smile as she walked up to the front. The Sorting Hat barely touched her head before it yelled, "SLYTHERIN!"

* * *

The only light in the otherwise empty classroom came from the moon outside and from the three wands that moved every now and as if to punctuate their owners' hushed discussion.

"This is not how time travel works!"

In a perfect world, Daphne would hex Hermione all the way to the other side of the castle, but the world wasn't perfect and careless spell-casting had landed them in enough trouble as it was.

"Well," she said, trying and failing to keep her voice even, "if this is not how time travel works, then clearly we have nothing to worry about." Pansy reached for her hand, but Daphne shook her off. She couldn't deal with Pansy right now. She couldn't deal with either one of them right now — it was all she could do to keep it together as it was.

Hermione glared at her for a moment — hers the round, doll-like face of an angry, pouty eleven-year-old Daphne barely remembered — before looking away.

"Fine," she said sheepishly. "What do we do?"

" _We_ don't do anything. You have done enough. I'll take care of it."

"But—"

" _I_ will deal with it, Granger. All I need you and Pansy to do is not to fuck it up anymore than you already have. Listen to me, and listen carefully, because this is important. You can't change anything that happened. The smallest change could have unpredictable consequences. Disastrous ones. Do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Do you?"

"I understand, Greengrass. Everything like it happened before. I get it."

"See that you do." Daphne took a deep breath, trying to shake some of the nervous tension pressing against her chest. "Don't get caught getting back to Gryffindor Tower."

Hermione snorted at that. "Don't worry," she said with a small smile. "Got lots of practice." She tapped her wand once against her side, extinguishing the light, and listened carefully at the door for a second, before slipping out.

Daphne gave her a few minutes to get away, already fretting about their own trip back to the dungeon. They couldn't get caught. They absolutely could not get caught.

"Daph—"

"Let's go," she said, hoping that Filch was patrolling elsewhere, _praying_ that Peeves was causing mischief somewhere else.

Against all expectations, their luck held until they were safely in the deserted Slytherin common room. Only then did Daphne allow herself to breathe properly, feeling light-headed from sheer relief.

Pansy's hand was warm and familiar on her arm. "It's going to be fine, baby."

Daphne slapped Pansy's hand away, suddenly unconscionably angry.

"Go to sleep, Pansy," she said only, not trusting herself to say anything else. Sleep sounded like a good idea. If she were really lucky, her pillow would become sentient and choke her to death.

"Will you please stop being mad at me? It was not my stupid spell."

Daphne knew Pansy well enough to know that the petulance in her tone hid the hurt underneath, but just then she didn't care.

"You were baiting her," she said, too mad to care that her voice was too loud. "You wanted to rile her up. Well, congratulations, you did."

"That's not—"

"Do you understand in how much trouble we are?"

"Daphne—"

"Do you? In fact, forget about us. Do you realise how much we can screw up just by being here? The Dark Lord didn't do as much damage as we stand to do. All because you wanted to provoke Hermione Granger. Well done, Pansy. You've really outdone yourself this time."

And with that she turned and fled to the dormitories, before she could say anything else. It wasn't fair. She knew it wasn't fair even as she said it, but just then she didn't care. It was easier to be angry than to be scared, and Daphne was terrified. She knew enough to be. One did not mess with time. It was the first rule. It was the _only_ rule. It was the first thing they taught any of the Unspeakables working in the Time Room.

Time magic was dangerous. It was unpredictable. Any one small change could and often did snowball into something that could not be predicted or controlled. A word out of place here and suddenly they were faced with a future in which He Who Must Not Be Named had won the war, or they were dead, or any other number of horrible things had come to pass. That, of course, along with the ever-present worry that they would simply tear the fabric of time, and Merlin only knew what would happen then. There was a reason why the use of time-turners was carefully controlled, why time-turners themselves were crafted so that their scope was limited.

And Daphne did not know exactly what had landed them here, what had landed them _now_. She didn't know how to get them back to their own time. She didn't know how to fix it and she _had_ to fix it, because the alternative did not bear thinking about. She needed… She needed things she could never get here — access to the Department of Mysteries, to its library, to the artifacts kept there, to the cumulative knowledge gathered by generations of Unspeakables. She had none of that, and she could get none of that, so it was on her to figure it out, it was on her to fix it, and the weight of that was crushing.

She was already in bed by the time Pansy walked into the room. Daphne's back was turned, but she could still feel her walk around, could still tell when the other girl came to a stop by her bed.

"I'm sorry," Pansy said, her voice low and contrite.

Daphne made no reply. She shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep. And if the tension in her shoulders or the tears falling down her face gave away the fact that she was still awake, Pansy did not call her out on it.

* * *

Hermione would like to think that she was old enough and mature enough to have a handle on her temper, only clearly she didn't, because it was 1991 and she was eleven. Again. Over a stupid slur and Pansy Parkinson being her predictably spiteful self. And it's not as if she hadn't been called that and worse before. Merlin, it's not as if _Pansy_ hadn't called her that and worse before. A smarter woman would have kept her temper, but then a smarter woman would not have been in the Department of Mysteries to begin with. A smarter woman wouldn't have gone home with Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass, either.

For someone supposedly so smart, she certainly did a lot of dumb crap.

"You're saying it wrong," she told Ron, because that's what she had said all those years ago, and she didn't need to have been trained as an Unspeakable to understand the implications of their little predicament. "It's Win- _gar_ -dium Levi- _o_ -sa, make the 'gar' nice and long."

"You do it, then, if you're so clever," Ron snapped, and if one of them was going to lose it and accidentally break time, her money would have been on him, which only went to show that pride did always go before the fall.

Rolling her eyes, Hermione — who could produce a corporeal Patronus, and had duelled Alecto Carrow, and Antonin Dolohov, and Bellatrix-Freaking-Lestrange, and who knew ten different ways to break ancient Egyptian curses — waved her wand and levitated a feather four feet up, to Professor Flitwick's delight and everyone else's utter disgust.

Yeah, she'd been really popular those first few weeks.

It was before the troll attack in the dungeons, before she, Harry and Ron had become friends, and Hermione had almost forgotten how lonely she had been back then, how she had struggled to fit in, to make friends — too blunt, and bookish, and far too fond of following rules and making sure everyone else did too to be seen as anything but a bloody nuisance in Gryffindor Tower.

And it was exhausting. The whole thing was exhausting. Having to watch her every word and her every move, trying to make sure she did everything exactly as she'd done it the first time around — every last blunder, every last misstep — was exhausting. And who could remember everything that far back in time? The only thing she could do was try to get it right and hope that she didn't screw up more than she already had.

And if she were to be perfectly honest, that grated almost more than everything else. Smartest witch of her age and she hadn't thought twice about trying to stun someone in a room filled with unstable magical objects. Really, well done, Hermione. Ten points to Gryffindor.

She deserved what she got and worse.

When the class ended, she made sure not to linger inside the classroom. Everything exactly as it had been. There were things she couldn't remember, things that hadn't survived a decade and a war and all the things that had followed it, but she remembered this well enough.

She remembered the students filling the corridor. She remembered the noise and the chatter and the quiet pride at having done well in class. When Ron's words came, barbed and harsh and stinging, she remembered those too.

"It's no wonder no one can stand her," he said to Harry. "She's a nightmare, honestly."

She had been expecting it, she knew it was coming, but it still hit her like a brick wall. There was nothing staged about the way she sucked in her breath, nothing fabricated about the tears she wasn't quick enough to conceal as she hurried past them, knocking into Harry in her haste to be anywhere but there, and studiously avoiding looking at Pansy, who had chosen that exact moment to walk by, because of course she had. In the exciting life of Hermione Granger it never rained but it poured, and if her best friends were going to comment on what an insufferable shrew she was, it was bound to be within earshot of the person most likely to enjoy it.

A loud crash behind her was followed by a number of loud thuds and Ron's startled, "What the bloody hell?", but Hermione did not stop to look. She hurried down the corridor and did not slow down until she found herself in an empty classroom, the door banging shut behind her.

She closed her eyes, trying to get a grip. She wasn't eleven years old anymore. She wasn't going to fall to pieces over a stupid comment made by Ron over ten years ago. She wasn't. She refused to. The strangled sob sounded too loud in the quiet room, and Hermione hid her face in her hands, wretched and inconsolable and furious at herself. She didn't look up when someone walked in. No one had followed her the first time around.

When Hermione finally managed to get her outburst under control, Pansy was standing a few feet away, watching her with a guarded expression.

"Done with the pity party?" she asked, handing her a pack of tissues.

And there was something absolutely bizarre about eleven-year-old Pansy Parkinson — or any-age Pansy Parkinson, really — checking up on her, but Hermione knew better than to point it out.

"You shouldn't have done that," she said instead, drying her eyes.

Pansy smirked, not needing to ask what _that_ was. No one had Flipendoed Harry and Ron the first time around, and there were only so many people in the school who could have pulled off a non-verbal spell. Certainly only so many students.

"My wand slipped," she said with a shrug, leaning up against the desk, next to Hermione, their shoulders just touching.

"Why are you here, Pansy?"

Their eyes met and for a moment the only sound was that of students walking and chatting and laughing outside. Pansy was the first one to look away.

"I'm sorry about what I said."

Hermione did not think Pansy had ever apologised for a thing in her life.

"I'm sorry I tried to stun you."

And if either thought the other's apology was lacking, neither thought to point it out. Pansy leaned her head on Hermione's shoulder, and Hermione let her, looping her arm around the other girl's and leaning her head on hers. It shouldn't be that easy — it _wasn't_ that easy — but they were none of them so proud nor any of them so foolish that they didn't know that any port would do in a storm.


	4. The Room of Requirement

**AN: About to get on a plane, so today's chapter goes up early :) Hope you enjoy it!**

* * *

It was the middle of the day when everything changed. One second Pansy was half paying attention to Quirrell's stuttering his way through a lesson on the Knockback Jinx — and she had that one covered, thank you very much — and the next Moody was torturing a giant spider not three feet from her, causing her to almost jump out of her skin.

"Squeamish, Miss Parkinson?" he said with a smirk, causing a number of students — those not bothered by the casual use of Unforgivables and not as properly terrified of Pansy as they should have been by this point — to snigger.

"Not at all, Professor," she said, forcing herself to smile. Draco raised an inquisitive eyebrow at her, but Pansy ignored him, turning back in her seat to look at Daphne, who was sitting where she had sat all through their fourth year DADA classes — one row back and to the side, next to Millie. Back then Daphne had been one of the few Slytherins openly bothered by Moody's little demonstration, but she looked positively ashen now.

Pansy caught up with her outside of class, saying under the general commotion, "I take it this is not good?"

"What? Being tossed around by the vagaries of an unknown time spell? Whatever gave you that impression?"

Finally out of patience, Pansy grabbed Daphne's arm, bringing them both to a halt in the middle of the crowded corridor. "Enough with the attitude," she hissed.

Daphne glared, shaking her arm free. Before she could say anything, however, Draco chose that precise moment to interrupt.

"Parkinson," he called, sauntering up to them. "I need a date for the Yule Ball."

The smile Pansy gave him was a little flirty, a little cocky, partly designed to charm him and entirely designed to bother Daphne, because she was perfectly capable of multitasking and she really wasn't above being that petty.

"And what am I supposed to do about that, Malfoy?" she asked as he wrapped his arms around her, this boy she still adored even after everything that had happened — the Dark Mark, and the war, and the realisation that she'd really much rather be sleeping with women.

"Oh, I thought I'd grant you the honour to show up on my arm."

Pansy chuckled at that, her smile growing a little wider as he pressed against her. "Honour, is it?"

"Great honour," he repeated before kissing her. Pansy smiled against his lips and kissed him back. And if she put in a little more enthusiasm than she had the first time around, that was neither here nor there.

When she pulled back, Daphne was gone.

Daphne was gone, but Hermione was standing at the end of the now almost-deserted corridor, eyeing her with barely-concealed disapproval.

Suppressing a sigh, Pansy pushed Draco away and told him she had an errand to run and would see him in class. Thus dismissed, he took off to find Crabbe and Goyle, and Pansy — making sure there was no one around to notice or care — followed Hermione into an empty classroom.

"That was very mature," the other witch pointed out the minute the door was closed.

"Shut up," was Pansy's less than sophisticated reply. Everything exactly as it had been was one thing, but Pansy knew perfectly well when she was being a bitch. It's just that most of the time she didn't care.

"You need to talk to Daphne."

"Thank you for the relationship advice, Granger, but I've got it covered."

"Yeah, you're doing a brilliant job, Parkinson. Absolutely splendid."

Pansy sighed, closing her eyes for a second. "She's mad," she finally said, because if you couldn't share your relationship woes with your former school nemesis whom you had slept with the one time and were now stuck back in time with, who could you share it with?

"Yeah," Hermione agreed — far too promptly and entirely too unhelpfully. "You still need to talk to her."

Yeah, she did, and what's more, she would, but first she was going to sulk some more, because honestly, it's not as if she'd meant for any of this to happen. It wasn't unreasonable to shield an attack — an attack that might not have been entirely unprovoked, but if Gryffindors lacked impulse control, that was hardly her fault.

And a case could be made that Hermione would never have been in the Department of Mysteries to begin with if Pansy hadn't decided to pick her up at that stupid club, but Pansy did not remember Daphne shooting down the idea, and she certainly did not remember her complaining about it while moaning Hermione's name later that night.

Pansy was still going over the many ways in which this was all really Daphne's fault when she walked into her next class — Transfiguration, because that was just what she needed out of her day: two hours stuck in a classroom with Minerva McGonagall.

Her indignation lasted only until she realised Daphne wasn't in class. And Pansy couldn't be sure, she couldn't swear it — it had been so long ago — but she didn't remember Daphne not being in class that day. She didn't remember McGonagall's pursed lips, nor her pointed comment about how money and status would not take them far in life if they did not apply themselves to their studies. She certainly did not remember McGonagall docking ten Slytherin points. Daphne had never cost them points in her life.

When the class was finally dismissed — after what seemed like years — Pansy ran all the way to the dungeons, but Daphne was nowhere to be found. She tried the library next, and the Great Hall, and then the Hospital Wing, because if Daphne was changing things — after all the warnings, after everything she had said — there had to be a good reason, there had to be an excellent reason, and Pansy did not even realise how scared she'd been of what that reason might be until she confirmed that all the beds in the Hospital Wing were empty.

She was late for Charms, but she only made it as far as the door. One look was enough to inform her that Daphne was not in her seat, and for a moment Pansy did not know what to do. She couldn't change anything — that's what Daphne had said, that's what Daphne had been at pains to stress — but Daphne wasn't there, and that was different, she was absolutely sure that was different, and she didn't know what to do.

Before Professor Flitwick could notice her hovering in the doorway, Pansy quietly took off, heading to the other side of the castle. She'd seen a Weasley close to the Arithmancy classroom, and while one Weasley looked much like another, she was pretty sure this was the right one. No one could be unlucky all the time, not even her, and when she got there, the door was slightly ajar — enough that she could see Hermione sitting next to Longbottom. Making sure no one was around, Pansy waved her wand and Hermione's quill sprang to life under its owner's startled look, quickly scribbling a message that had Hermione frowning at the parchment before stealing a glance towards the door. Their eyes met and Hermione shook her head, almost imperceptibly, but Pansy was not to be deterred by Granger's scruples.

The quill moved again, and Hermione's frown deepened. She raised a hand and told Professor Vector she was feeling unwell, and could she please be excused. Not a minute later she was out in the corridor.

"What part of change nothing are you having trouble with?" she hissed, moving away from the door.

"Daphne is missing. I can't find her. This didn't happen the last time."

Hermione cursed under her breath and hurried her step. "Come on," she said, and Pansy followed. The Slytherin ended up outside Gryffindor Tower, waiting awkwardly by the entrance while the other girl went in search of something. When she came back, she was carrying a piece of parchment. Without pausing to explain, Hermione lead the way to a broom cupboard. Once inside, she opened the blank parchment on top of an upside down bucket and tapped it with her wand. "I solemnly swear that I'm up to no good."

An intricate map of the castle spread across the parchment, complete with markers for all its denizens — every student, every teacher, every god-damned ghost. Even the house-elves merited small, moving identifiers.

"How in Merlin's name—"

"Not important," Hermione said, carefully examining the map. "See if you can find Daphne."

They looked, and looked, and looked some more, but Pansy could not see her. Everyone was there, but she couldn't find Daphne. She could see Snape down in the dungeons, and Dumbledore in the Headmaster's office, and Viktor Krum doing Merlin only knew what in the library. She could even see the Bloody Baron, who had been dead for ten centuries, but she could not find Daphne. She wasn't there. She wasn't there and Pansy did not know what to do, except freak out because Daphne was missing and she could be in trouble and Pansy did not know what to do about it, and the last time she'd seen her she'd kissed Draco — partly because that's what had happened the first time, sure, but mostly out of spite, and what sort of person did that make her?

"She's not here," she said, her voice strange to her own ears. "She's not in the castle. How is it even possible? Where the hell—"

"Easy, Pansy. She's in the castle." Hermione's calm tone only served to aggravate her further.

"She's not in the bloody castle. She's nowhere in this damn thing." She could hear the slightly hysterical tone in her voice, but there was absolutely nothing she could do about it. "I've looked it over ten times. She's not here."

"It doesn't show Unplottable locations." Hermione tapped the map with her wand and the parchment became blank again. "If we can't see her— The Room of Requirement. Let's go."

They ran all the way up to the seventh floor, coming to a stop in the middle of a deserted corridor. The wall ran uninterrupted from one end of the corridor to the other, but Pansy did not question Hermione. She remembered the room. She remembered helping break into it in their fifth year. She remembered Dumbledore's Army, trying to get away, none of them making it very far. All of it for a golden star from a pink bat who'd not make it to the end of the school year. Not Pansy's smartest move.

"What would she turn it into it?" Hermione muttered, not really a question. "Somewhere she could work. The Room can't replicate the Time Room, but maybe some of the research material… Some of the instruments…"

It took almost fifteen minutes and three tries, but the door finally appeared. Pansy did not wait to see if Hermione followed. The second there was a doorknob, she rushed in, only to stop dead in her tracks.

Daphne did not acknowledge their presence, did not even seem to notice them. She sat cross-legged on a magic circle in the middle of the room, her eyes blind and unblinking, her face made alien and unfamiliar by the deep shadows cast by the ethereal blue light of the runes that made up the circle. Magic was crackling all around them, heavy and dense, with a taste like metal, and Daphne's voice was strained and unnaturally deep as it chanted unfamiliar words that made all the hairs on Pansy's arms stand up.

Hermione moved a little closer, looking down at the sheets of parchment scattered on the floor, but Pansy did not move from where she was rooted in place. It had never occurred to her to wonder exactly what it was Unspeakables did in the deep confines of the Department of Mysteries, but she wondered now, staring at this Daphne who looked so remote and unreachable — not quite human, not quite flesh and blood.

Daphne gasped and for a split second she looked like herself again — young and human and breakable. The light of the circle flickered and a grimace of pain flashed across her expression as dark, red stains spread across her shirt sleeves. Her voice wavered for a second and then the chanting grew in intensity and the light of the circle flared up. When invisible hands cut deep gashes on her face and neck, she did not so much as flinch. She didn't, but Pansy lunged forward, a startled shout on her lips. Hermione caught her before she could reach the circle.

"Don't," she said, struggling to stop Pansy. "You can't break the circle."

"It's hurting her."

"You break it and it's going to hurt us. It's keeping the magic contained."

"Granger, if you don't let go of me this instant—"

A loud crash drowned her words and they watched in horror as Daphne was tossed across the room like a rag doll, hitting the opposite wall and falling to the ground unresponsive. Pansy pushed Hermione off and ran to her girlfriend, not bothering to sidestep the fading runes.


	5. The Plan

Hermione had no real aptitude for healing magic, nor any particular liking for it. What she did have, however, was lots and lots of practice — the natural result of a long, drawn-out war and of the six years of semi-constant mortal danger before it. Madam Pomfrey might have done things more neatly or more efficiently, but Hermione's quick and dirty methods — which mostly involved huge amounts of dittany and hoping for the best — did the trick just as well.

When Daphne opened her eyes, Pansy, who up to that point had been doing a great job staving off a bout of hysterics, finally broke down crying, hiding her face in her hands and calling someone — maybe Daphne, probably Daphne, and most definitely Daphne — a fucking idiot.

The fucking idiot in question reached up to tug Pansy closer and the witch curled down, hugging Daphne and sobbing loudly as the other girl stroked her hair.

And Hermione — who had seen more people hurt than she could count, who had healed open wounds and lacerations and broken bones as curses flew over her head — Hermione started shaking, too relieved to do anything but sit there, light-headed and overwhelmed.

She had thought the days of trying to patch people up with a band-aid and a prayer were behind her.

A soft hand covered hers and Hermione looked down at Daphne who smiled a soft, reassuring smile that only added to the gut-wrenching, all-too-familiar feeling of barely-avoided disaster. Daphne squeezed her hand, and Hermione squeezed back, blinking away tears.

* * *

"You reproduced these from memory?" she asked a while later, looking over the sheets of parchment scattered around what had previously been Daphne's circle and was now only a stretch of floor — empty and unremarkable.

Daphne and Pansy were sitting on a small cluster of pillows a few feet away, Pansy busy fussing over Daphne, while Hermione devoted her attention to Daphne's research and studiously avoided looking at them. There was something about that casual picture of intimacy — small touches and entwined fingers and the look of exasperated fondness Daphne was giving Pansy — that made her feel lonely and melancholy and left out, and she wasn't going to examine that too closely, because that way lay nothing but trouble.

"It's not complete." Daphne got up, despite Pansy's protests, and joined Hermione, picking up another piece of parchment. "This one and this one are correct, as far as I can remember. This one here has gaps. And this one is missing things even in the original we have access to at the Ministry. It's— It's old magic. It's something we study, but it's not really something— It's not really something we do."

"And you still thought trying it out was a good idea?" The anger in Pansy's tone was painfully obvious, but Daphne merely sighed.

"It was bad enough when whatever it was threw us back to our first year. But this… It's volatile Pansy, more than I thought it was. This sort of instability, it's— It's unnatural, it's dangerous, and I don't just mean because of what we may or may not change. Even if we're careful, even if we're as careful as we can possibly be — and it's impossible to do everything just right, but even if we did — it's only a matter of time until something snaps. We're too far from our point of origin and the spell is too unstable. Sooner or later, something will break."

"What happens when it does?"

Daphne stared at the chart in front of her for a moment, tracing the edges of it with her fingers. "I don't know," she said at last, her voice almost toneless. "There's conjecture, of course. But it's academic. Theoretical."

Which wasn't an answer, so much as an evasion. "Best case scenario?" Hermione pressed.

Daphne sighed and looked up at Hermione. "Best case scenario, the time stream rights itself. It removes the source of instability and adapts around it."

"Source of instability, meaning the spell?" Pansy asked.

Daphne glanced at Pansy but did not reply, which was answer enough for Hermione. "And worst case scenario?" she asked, because if the best case scenario was their impending death, she really wanted to know what the worst case scenario looked like.

"Worst case scenario, the time stream is unable to self-correct and it starts collapsing on itself."

If they ever made it out of this, Hermione was never going anywhere near the Department of Mysteries for as long as she lived.

They stood in silence for several moments, each busy trying to digest the many ways in which they were screwed.

"Okay," Hermione finally said, because she had been on the receiving end of Fiendfyre, and smashing spells, and the Cruciatus Curse, and she refused to die over a stun. She absolutely refused. "Okay," she repeated. "So we need a plan." And she was really good at those. She was absolutely great at those. "We'll find what went wrong and we'll fix it, and we'll try again."

* * *

It wasn't a plan so much as a prayer disguised as bullet points, and Daphne did not kid herself into thinking otherwise. It rested on a bed of conjecture and sketchy magical theory and the sort of extrapolations that could only very generously be described as anything but reckless.

"Even if what you're suggesting were possible," Daphne said, hunting down the package of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans that she knew was somewhere in the chaos of books and parchment littered around them, "no one can harness that amount of power. You try to channel something like that, and it _will_ kill you."

It was the sort of harebrained idea that only sleep-deprived Gryffindor brains high on sugar could come up with — daring and desperate and wildly ill-advised.

"No, but look," Hermione said, grabbing a tome that should Madam Pince ever learn had been removed from the Restricted Section would have her on a war path to rival the crusades. "We do it like a coven. We split the strain among the three of us."

"Old school," Pansy said appreciatively, popping another bean into her mouth, the thieving fiend.

"Three witches aren't a coven." She took the package from Pansy and then immediately cringed when she bit into a tripe bean. "There's too few of us to even consider—"

Hermione tutted her while stealing the Every Flavour Beans, because apparently both her and Pansy lacked any sense of shame. "Three is enough if we use anchors."

"What would you even use as anchors for something like this?" This being using the school as a gigantic battery on steroids. Those had been Hermione's exact words, and while Pansy had frowned at the concept, Daphne knew exactly what a battery was, thank you very much, just as she knew that trying to tap into the school's magic like that was less like using it as a battery and more like touching a live wire.

"I'm so glad you asked." Hermione's excited smile was enthusiastic and infectious and stunning, and for a split second Daphne minded much less the fact that they were all going to die. "We'll use Essence of Dragon, Basilisk, Phoenix and Unicorn."

Daphne opened her mouth to point out all the reasons why that wouldn't work, only to close it again. "Where would you even find a basilisk?" she asked instead.

Hermione laughed, looking down at the book in front of her. "That really won't be a problem."

* * *

It was a good plan, a solid plan, the sort of plan that had everything to work except for all the parts where it could all go to hell, which made it exactly the sort of plan Hermione was used to.

Their biggest problem at the moment was a logistic one. Daphne was right — the spell that had landed them in the past was unstable, and it kept tossing them back and forth. Two hours spent back in 1991 gave way to two days in their sixth year, gave way to almost a week stuck in April 1993. There was never telling how long they would be at any given point in time and no way to trigger the change that they could see. And because the Room of Requirement was subject to the passage of time as much as anything else, if they moved forward in time all their notes and all their research was still there, but if they moved back, it was all gone.

It was maddening and in no way improved by the fact that every time the timeline skipped, Daphne got that same blank expression, that trademark unflappable Unspeakable look that meant she thought this was it, this was the skip that finally broke the universe, only showing it would be against some sort of Unspeakable covenant whereby they were not supposed to spook civilians about their imminent death.

So far the fabric of time and space had held.

Essence of Phoenix and Essence of Unicorn were relatively easy to get, in that they only required them to sneak into the Headmaster's office (without getting caught) and the Forbidden Forest (without getting caught and/or killed). Tricky, perhaps, but not impossible, specially considering Hermione was uniquely qualified to pull those off.

She got her hands on Essence of Phoenix in 1992, and then waited until they had moved on from 1996 (because they'd have to rely on getting at least that far in the timeline again to access it) and past 1991 (because Quirrell had spent much of that year prowling around the Forbidden Forest for unicorns with Voldemort on the back of his head) to finally get her hands on Essence of Unicorn in the single day they spent in 1993.

Essence of Basilisk was hard, because it required a live basilisk, and Hermione had no wish to get herself killed down in the Chamber of Secrets trying to get it. Luckily for her (or not so luckily for her), the spell very conveniently landed them in their second year just in time for Hermione to get what she needed before forcing herself to look at the damn thing's reflection and get herself petrified. Again. Because she was a good little soldier who understood that sometimes the good of the many outweighed the good of the one. Really.

Through all of that they went to class and did their homework and pretended everything was fine and dandy (or as fine and dandy as things had been at any given time, which tended to vary wildly).

They met when they could, late at night in the Room of Requirement, when everyone else was asleep and none of them — meaning Hermione — was busy sneaking around elsewhere with Ron and Harry. Hermione didn't even know what sleep was anymore. She was so incredibly, completely, absolutely tired all the time, exhausted down to her bones, that she was always one hair's breadth away from a crying fit or a shouting match or a nervous breakdown, only she couldn't indulge in any of those, because _that's not what had happened the first time around_.

All she wanted was for them to get to the right part of their first or fourth year so that she could get the Essence of Dragon and do the stupid spell or die trying, which at this point was absolutely fine with Hermione, as long as it meant she could close her eyes for more than two hours at a time.

When they finally made it back to their fourth year, however, it was June and the dragons were long gone.

They sat in silence in the Room of Requirement, the floor around them covered in colourful pillows and sheets and sheets of parchment, and the occasional half-empty box of Caramel Cobwebs and Fizzing Whizzbees and Peppermint Toads, because while it might not look it just then, they were all adults and if they wanted to eat their weight in sugar, that's what they were bloody well going to do.

"We'll need a full moon," Daphne said, breaking the silence. She frowned at the chart in front of her before checking something in the leather-bound book next to it. "Or a new moon, but a full moon would be better. Once we have everything, I mean."

Hermione made no reply. They'd never have everything. With their luck they'd just keep getting tossed back and forth, skirting the couple of weeks when there had been dragons at Hogwarts until reality was entirely screwed up, or they were dead, or both.

And that wasn't the only thing on her mind. It wasn't even the most pressing thing on her mind.

"In our third year," she said when she could no longer stand the what ifs rolling around inside her head, "McGonagall got permission from the Ministry for me to use a Time-Turner to keep up with all my classes, and Harry, Ron and I used it to save Buckbeak and Sirius Black." For all the good it had done Sirius down the line. "We went back three hours and changed what happened. We changed what happened and—"

"No, you didn't." Daphne's voice was kind, but firm, and Hermione did not look at her, because if she did she'd never be able to finish what she wanted to say.

"No, we really did. We knew what was going to happen, so we went back and changed it. We changed that and it was fine, so maybe if we—"

"Hermione, look at me. You didn't change it. It always happened like that. You were able to go back and change it _because_ you _always_ went back and changed it."

"That makes no sense."

Daphne's smile was soft and sad and apologetic. "Time travel doesn't always."

They were quiet after that, and Hermione should have dropped it, except that she couldn't. The more she tried to focus on the book in front of her, the more her mind kept coming back to that one thought.

"Cedric Diggory is going to die tomorrow."

Not 'Voldemort is going to rise again tomorrow'. Not 'He Who Must Not Be Named is gaining his powers back tomorrow'. It was 'Cedric Diggory is going to die tomorrow', because in Hermione's mind that was the one death that had opened the floodgates to all the others, as if Cedric dying had somehow started a trend. Because Cedric had died, Sirius had died, and then Dumbledore, and Dobby, and Tonks, and Lupin, and Moody, and Lavender, and Colin, and McGonagall, and Luna, and the Patil twins, and the Weasley twins, and Ginny, and all the other Weasleys except Ron — even Molly who had treated her like a daughter, even Percy who despite everything had died like a hero — and so many others until all Hermione could see were corpses and coffins and graves.

"Yes," Daphne said only, in that toneless voice Unspeakables had perfected to an art.

"Maybe we could—"

"We can't."

"But—"

"Oh, for Merlin's sake." Pansy had none of Daphne's patience, and seldom any inclination to pretend otherwise. "We've been bending over backwards trying to remember what we said and did every minute of every day so we don't mess anything up, and you want to what? Save Diggory? He isn't dying tomorrow, Hermione. He died already. He's been dead for almost ten years, and there's no amount of Gryffindor sentimentality that would make trying to change that a good idea."

"Better Gryffindor sentimentality, _Parkinson_ ," she said, almost relieved to have a chance to lash out, to give expression to all the things bubbling inside of her, "than Slytherin callousness."

"Ah, yes." Pansy smirked, getting up. "We're evil, we're vile, we're the devil. Unlike you bastions of purity and goodness. But at least we have enough common sense to know when to cut our losses."

"How did cutting your losses work for you after the war, Parkinson?"

"How did making reckless, half-assed decisions work for you during it?" Her voice was sharp and cutting, like the edge of a knife. "How many died because the great Hermione Granger was too busy being good or heroic or brave to remember to be smart?"

Hermione didn't even realise she had drawn her wand until Daphne got between her and Pansy.

"Alright, that's enough," Daphne said, looking from one to the other. "This isn't helpful."

No, but then she hadn't meant it to be. Hermione wasn't sure what she had meant it to be. Cathartic, perhaps. As if by letting go of all the bile rising in her throat, she could stop herself from choking on it. In the end it had only made her feel worse, and she hadn't even known that was possible.

"Fuck you, Pansy," she said only, and turned to leave.


	6. The Spell

The timeline did not change again for another day, by the end of which Cedric Diggory was dead, He Who Must Not be Named was in full control of his powers, and Hermione — who had become progressively quieter and more withdrawn as the day progressed — had acquired the vacant look of someone who had been slowly hollowed out until there was nothing left but an empty shell that moved and talked and looked human, but only just.

And Daphne knew she ought to feel bad about it — about Diggory, and the Dark Lord, and all the things that would follow — but mostly she was just relieved that Hermione hadn't done something incredibly stupid. Cedric Diggory was dead, but they were still alive and the world was still spinning. It was as good an outcome as could be expected.

When all the students filed out of the Great Hall — quiet and subdued, some openly crying — Daphne looked around for Hermione, grabbing her arm in the confusion of people, and pulling her with her towards a small alcove, hidden by a heavy curtain.

"It was the right thing to do," she said, once they were alone.

Hermione looked towards the window, her gaze on the dark grounds outside. "Was it?" she said, her voice low and toneless.

There was really nothing Daphne could say that would make it better, so she didn't try. She reached out for Hermione instead, cupping her face with her hands and turning her face towards her.

"Yes," Daphne said only, before kissing her, a soft peck on the lips followed by another one on the cheek, followed by a soft sob Hermione buried in her hair.

Daphne didn't really care about Cedric Diggory. She hadn't then and she didn't now. He hadn't been someone she noticed, certainly not someone she cared about, and his death had registered as no more than an intellectual curiosity — the precursor to a war that had passed her largely by. Maybe it did make her callous, but no one became an Unspeakable who wasn't at least a little unfeeling.

She did care about this however, about the girl softly crying in her arms, about what it did to her. She cared and that fact would have surprised all of them — the young Daphne who had been only very vaguely aware of the existence of Hermione Granger, and the adult Daphne who had tasted strawberry shots on her lips, and any version of Hermione who had ever met any of them.

The only unsurprised one among them would probably have been Pansy, who had always claimed Daphne had a soft spot for strays.

* * *

"You need to talk to her," Daphne said without looking away from her book.

"I don't see why." Pansy was sitting next to her, their legs touching under the table. "If she wants to sulk like a child, that's her business."

It was early 1994 and they were working in the Great Hall under the supervision of Professor Snape and Professor McGonagall while the school was searched yet again for signs of Sirius Black. Neither the Dementors nor the teachers would find a thing, of course, not on this occasion, and not on the many that would follow, but at least it was better than sitting through classes, and it made it easier to talk, as long as they weren't too obvious about it and made sure to refresh their Muffliato Charms.

"You're both acting like children, and I need you to get over yourselves."

Pansy and Hermione weren't talking to each other, because apparently the three of them had been stuck back at school long enough that they were reverting to actual teenagers. It was absurd and aggravating, and Daphne was about ready to strangle them both.

"If you're so worried, you talk to her," Pansy said, adding in a lower voice when McGonagall shushed her, "You're such great pals now, after all."

Daphne snorted. "Jealousy doesn't suit you, Panse. You're just bitter you let her goad you into an argument and said more than you meant to say."

"I said exactly as much as I meant to say, thank you very much. And you're a fool if you think she will ever look at either one of us and see anything but prejudiced, cowardly, treacherous snakes, however little she cares about it after a few drinks. As far as she's concerned — as far as any of them are concerned — any difference between us and Bellatrix Lestrange is purely academic."

Her tone was all unconcerned nonchalance, but Daphne knew her well enough and had known her for long enough to hear the hurt underneath. Hooking a hand around the back of her neck, she pulled Pansy to her and kissed her temple before letting go again, just in time for Snape to turn a blind eye to the both of them, as Daphne knew he would.

"You like her," she said, turning her attention to her textbook and underlining the three main causes of the Goblin Rebellions.

"I don't. Not in general and certainly not like you're suggesting."

Daphne smirked but did not press other than to say, "Talk to her."

* * *

They finally managed to get their hands on Essence of Dragon in May 1991, and Pansy was only mildly surprised to learn that the precious Golden Trio had smuggled a dragon out of Hogwarts in their first year, because of course they had. During the seven years she had spent at school there had been only two things she had been entirely certain of: the stairways always moved in the way most likely to make everyone late for class, and Potter and Co. were always up to something that was grounds for expulsion ten times over unless you happened to be Dumbledore's pet Boy Wonder or one of his friends, in which case it was grounds for house points and a pat on the back.

Not that she was bitter or anything.

It did mean, however, that Hermione finally deigned to grace the Room of Requirement with her presence to let them know they had everything they needed to put an end to that charming trip down memory lane and go back to their own time.

"Good timing," Daphne said, putting the flask Hermione handed her in the box with the other three. "Tomorrow's a full moon."

Good timing would have been several weeks and far too many time skips ago, but Pansy would take what she could get.

They spent the better part of the night going over every last detail of the spell until Pansy was ready to scream, not the least because while Hermione had been off Merlin only knew where nursing her injured pride, she and Daphne had spent long evenings working on the bloody thing, learning it backwards and forwards. Not that Miss Perfectionism cared.

"For the tenth time, it's TEM-po-ra, not tem-PO-ra."

"Oh bite me, Granger," Pansy said, and added despite Daphne's audible sigh, "We've been at this for three hours straight. We know it as well as we're going to."

"We get one chance at this. If we screw it up—"

"We die, everyone dies, the universe dies. It will be bad, it will be terrible, it will be the worst. I get it, I heard it, you've made your damn point."

The TEM-po-ra v. tem-PO-ra debate was the highlight of the evening. Neither the mood nor the content of the discussion improved from there. By the time five a.m. came around and both Daphne and Hermione agreed it was probably for the best if they all went and got some sleep, Pansy had half a mind to mess up the spell just to spite them both and their pathological need to try and control every last thing.

The few hours of sleep she managed to get did very little to dispel the aggravation from the night before, and it was probably a good thing they were going home, because if she had to spend another second playing nice with Hermione-Freaking-Granger, she was going to stab someone with her wand. Probably Granger. Probably repeatedly.

Her mind was busy going over the many reasons why she could not stand the other woman (never had, never would, and Daphne could stuff it) — a very long list in which Muggle-born did not rank nearly as high as "insufferable know it all" — when everything changed.

One moment she was running down a staircase — late for class because she had slept for only two hours and the universe hated her — and the next she was in the Great Hall, the words out of her mouth before she could recall them back:

"But he's there! Potter's _there_! Someone grab him!"

Pansy stared in horror at her outstretched arm, at the accusing finger pointing at the wizard across the room.

 _No. No, no, no, no, no. Not this. Not this day. No._

"Thank you, Miss Parkinson." Pansy barely even heard McGonagall, her mind too full of panic and fear and rage at the unfairness of it all. They had everything they needed to go home. They finally had everything. Weeks of trudging through first-year classes and third-year homework, and the Yule Ball, and the Triwizard Tournament and Cedric Diggory, and they could finally go home, except that they couldn't because it wasn't a full moon and even if it had been they would never have found the time to do the bloody spell in the middle of the chaos about to be unleashed in the castle.

And where the hell was Hermione?

Pansy was surrounded by a sea of hostile faces — hard, belligerent, accusing — more than one wand pointed at her, and she couldn't even bring herself to care, because she couldn't see Hermione, and had she been in the room the first time around? She couldn't remember. She couldn't think and she couldn't remember, and so many of the people in the Great Hall would be dead before the night was out — Neville Longbottom, who was shaking his head sadly, as if personally disappointed in Pansy; Ginny Weasley who would love nothing more than an excuse to hex her all the way to the other side of the school. So many other Gryffindors and Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs and even Slytherins.

A warm hand on her back nudged her forward, and Pansy moved to follow Filch out of the room as she had all those years ago, only this was wrong. This was all wrong.

"We can't leave without her," she whispered to Daphne who had fallen in step beside her. "Daph—"

"Quiet," Daphne hissed, flicking her wand once to cast a silent Muffliato. "Nothing can change. You know as well as—"

"Not this time. Not this." The Battle of Hogwarts had been a massacre. Too many Death Eaters, too many kids playing the hero, too many flaws in the school defences. They had been overrun in a matter of hours and it was nothing short of a miracle that Potter had made it out alive. Pansy had never once doubted that leaving had been the smart thing to do, and the benefit of hindsight had done nothing to change her mind on that score, which made what she was about to say all the more ridiculous. "We can't leave. She'll see them all die. Again. We can't—"

"We can, and we will." Daphne's tone was iron and Pansy did not have to look very hard to see the older Unspeakable in the face of the young girl walking next to her. "You know the consequences of—"

"Oh for Merlin's sake." Millie gave them a funny look, but Pansy was fairly sure she couldn't hear most of what they were saying and wouldn't have understood it if she could. "Do you honestly think," she continued, lowering her voice, "that Hermione is just going to stand by while everyone she loves dies around her? Things are going to change. _She_ is going to change them. And get herself killed for her troubles, like as not. She'll burn the universe to the ground before allowing _this_ day to play out like it did the first time, and if you think any different you haven't been paying attention. And if we can't stop her, we might as well help her."

Daphne swore under her breath and Pansy knew she had her. It was hard to argue with the facts.

"We can't be seen," Daphne said. "After what happened in the Great Hall, you'll be seen as a fair target."

"Lucky me," Pansy said just as a discreet wave of Daphne's wand caused Filch to stand a little straighter. "So what do we do?"

"Pray." Daphne grabbed her arm and slowed down, letting the other Slytherins walk past them. Pansy didn't know exactly what spells she was using — non-verbal magic had always come easily to Daphne — but she could see its effects. None of their friends spared them so much as a glance; no one seemed to notice or care that Pansy and Daphne had fallen behind.


	7. The Battle of Hogwarts

They hurried in the opposite direction, avoiding the main staircases and choosing instead the back passages to the upper floors, hoping that would lower their chances of running into anyone. If they were lucky — and they were surely overdue for some luck — most everyone would still be in the Great Hall.

"Filch will know we haven't left," Pansy said, because that was going to be a problem.

"Filch will tell anyone who asks that we've left with the rest of our House."

Pansy glanced at Daphne but did not comment. There was only one spell that would get someone to do someone else's bidding, and the fact that her girlfriend was a little bit terrifying should not have been as hot as it was.

They made their way to the seventh floor without incident, and into the Room of Requirement without anyone being any the wiser.

"We need Hermione." Daphne went straight to the box where they kept the four essences.

"What are we going to do?"

"Something daring and desperate and wildly ill-advised. She'll love it."

Pansy's Patronus was rushing out of the room before Daphne had even finished speaking — bright and sharp and more solid than Pansy felt. Merlin, this was such a bad idea.

Not ten minutes had passed before Hermione came bursting into the room.

"What in Merlin's name are you two still doing here?"

"Making really bad life choices. Come here, both of you." Daphne knelt on the floor, opening the box and picking up a small flask Pansy hadn't seen before. "We don't have a lot of time."

"What is that?" Pansy asked.

"Felix Felicis."

"How on earth did you get Felix Felicis? If we give it to Harry—" Hermione made to reach for it, but Daphne moved it out of reach.

"Potter will make it alive to the end of the day. That's lucky plenty. We need this more than he does."

"What are we going to do?"

"We're going to win the Battle of Hogwarts and try not to destroy the universe in the process."

There was no amount of Felix Felicis, no amount of luck in the world that could make up for the fact that what they were about to do was a really, really bad idea, but since Pansy had been the one to encourage this lunacy, she was not about to point it out.

Daphne's plan was simple and elegant and very likely to get them all killed either through working perfectly (and thus risking screwing up the time stream for good) or not working at all (in which case they'd probably end up on the receiving end of an Unforgivable, thus changing what had happened and risking screwing up the time stream for good anyway).

There was magic in Hogwarts that was older and more powerful than anything even Voldemort could dream up. Magic that was not meant for mortal hands, that no mortal could hope to control. They had been counting on that power to get them home, and now they were counting on it to stop the war before it even began. It was either incredibly optimistic of them or unbelievably arrogant, and Pansy wasn't sure which. She wasn't sure it mattered.

"The current flows both ways," Daphne said. "We'll be able to tap into the castle's magic, and it will be able to tap into ours."

"Our magic is like a drop of water compared to—"

"That's not the important part. It will be able to tap into the Felix Felicis. In theory."

A lot of it was theory. Not terribly sound theory, either, but they were desperate and out of time.

"Give me your hand," Daphne said, grabbing a dagger and cutting a thin line across her palm. Blood magic was old and dangerous and not nearly the stupidest thing they were about to do. It would connect them all, make sure the three of them were sharing the burden of the ritual even though Hermione would be down in the lower floors playing the hero while Daphne and Pansy worked from the top of the Astronomy Tower — the highest point in the castle, right above the entrance.

Pansy sucked in her breath when the spell worked and Daphne and Hermione were suddenly _right there_ , their minds close enough to touch, nothing between them but air. She could have closed her eyes and been able to see them all the way across the castle, all the way across the country.

"Merlin," Hermione whispered, and Pansy could feel the fear and nervousness and sheer sense of wonder radiating off the witch, could feel her prodding tentatively at the edges of their shared bond.

"It will be hard enough with three people," Daphne said, the agitation bubbling right under her skin as clear to Pansy as if it had been her own. "If one of us dies, the sheer amount of power will kill us all."

Odds were good they were all going to die regardless.

They shared the Felix Felicis. There was only enough that each of them got a few drops, but it was enough. The moment Pansy drank it, all thoughts of death and gloom fled, replaced by an unshakable belief in their ability to achieve the impossible and make everything right. They would make sure the castle held, make sure their side won the battle, make sure the time stream remained stable long enough for them to pull it off. And they _would_ go home afterwards.

"I'll meet you guys in the tower when it's over," Hermione said, her surety in the fact that they would all be alive at the end of the day a bright light, loud and clear across their bond.

"Hermione," Pansy called when the other girl turned to leave, not even questioning that it was the right move, not even pausing to think. Felix Felicis left no room for doubts or misgivings, and Pansy had none when she kissed Hermione — nothing but the realisation that she had wanted to do that for weeks.

"Took you long enough," Daphne said, and Pansy could hear the amusement in her tone, could feel her fondness, warm and bright all around them.

* * *

It was a heady thing, that feeling deep in her gut that nothing bad could possibly happen, nothing bad would ever happen — like jumping off a cliff and trusting that something would catch her. It was illogical and ridiculous and unlikely to keep her alive in the long run, but it hadn't failed her yet.

The castle was humming in and all around her, old and magical and powerful, like a breathing, living thing. Hermione could feel its magic coursing through her, could feel its rage at the invaders that dared trespass upon its halls and courtyards, puny little creatures who fancied themselves powerful because they knew how to wave a stick.

And it should have made her feel small, it should have made her feel tiny next to that behemoth with its ancient magic and deep foundations and towers that reached upwards towards the sky, but it didn't. Hermione felt untouchable, unreachable, invincible. They would carry the day if she had to carry it herself.

Not that she would have to. Not single-handedly. No one else had drunk the Felix Felicis, but its effects were felt throughout the castle, carried by their spell, held in place by sheer force of will, and people were ducking out of the way of curses that should have killed them, and hitting masked nightmares with deadly accuracy, and becoming smarter and faster and better.

It wasn't perfect — nothing in life was, not even magic. Many still fell to Death Eater wands, many still broke under Death Eater curses. But Hermione had seen the world end once before, on this day all those many years ago, and it didn't begin to compare. A time would come to mourn their dead — and her heart broke at the though of those whose fate they had been unable to change — but she would make sure it ended here. Whatever else she did, she would make sure this war ended today.

* * *

Pansy could feel the moment the Felix Felicis started to wear off, like a sudden chill in the air. It was subtle at first, a small hint of doubt, the sudden realisation that even if they made it though the day, chances were still good that they were probably screwed anyway.

When the Dark Lord walked into the school with Harry Potter's dead body, she knew their luck had finally ran out.

Hermione's pain — shocked and sharp and overwhelming — reverberated across their bond like movement on a spider's web, hitting her and Daphne like a brick wall. Daphne whimpered and Pansy squeezed her hands, trying to keep them both grounded because they were still connected to the school, high up in the Astronomy Tower, and they had come too far to falter now, with or without their extra luck.

"Come on, Potter," Pansy said through gritted teeth, Hermione's grief raw and crushing in her mind. "Make your own goddamn luck."

When Harry rolled to his feet — and only Potter could be such a drama queen as to literally rise from the dead — Pansy wasn't sure if the overpowering sense of relief was hers, Daphne's or Hermione's.

The moment Voldemort died they had half a second to share in the general euphoria before a wave of energy almost made them lose their hold on the spell.

"Get up here, Hermione," Daphne said even though Hermione couldn't hear them. She'd be able to feel Daphne's urgency, however, much like Pansy could. And Pansy could see only too clearly what had Daphne worried — the four essences they were using as anchors were almost gone. There was barely anything left in the bowl that held the Essence of Basilisk, and Essence of Dragon wasn't looking too good either.

They either did the spell now or not at all. And if they didn't drop their hold on the school's magic before the essences ran out, that was the end of the line for all of them.

"I'm here, I'm here." Hermione barged in, her clothes filthy, her hair a wild mass of curls. Daphne dropped one of Pansy's hands and Hermione joined them in the circle.

"The moon is waning," Pansy pointed out, as if there was anything they could do about it.

"Yeah," Daphne agreed. A small squeeze of her hand was all the warning she got before Daphne started the ritual, her voice loud and clear in the stillness around them. And after the insanity of the day they had just lived through, this was almost relaxing — the familiar pacing of a spell they had gone over time and time again until Pansy could chant it in her sleep, every word rolling off her tongue effortlessly.

And then Essence of Basilisk ran out and the extra burst of energy tore through them like dry kindle catching fire. Pansy almost let go, the pain sharp and blinding and punishing, but Daphne's grip on her and Hermione was like iron and it only took the witch a second to adjust, to ease the strain on both of them. Pansy would have admired the sort of skill required to do that, if only she hadn't been so painfully aware of the fact that Essence of Dragon was on its last legs, and Daphne would not be able to do it a second time.

The empty bowl burst, shards flying everywhere, and that could not be a good sign except that suddenly everything stood still, broken fragments hovering in mid-air. They just stood there for a second and then flew back the other way, stitching themselves together again, as if time was being rewound.

And this had to mean something. It had to be a sign that they were on the right track. They only needed to hold on a little bit longer. They were so close! So close.

When the four bowls burst at the same time, Pansy only had half a second to feel something akin to shock before the world went dark.


	8. Epilogue

Hermione stood across the street from the house, a soft drizzle caressing her skin and playing havoc with her hair. It was late, around dinner time. The lights on the street were already on, casting dark shadows on the buildings. The amount of passers-by had slowed down to a trickle of people who rushed past her without so much as a glance, in a hurry to get home and out of the rain.

The house was just an ordinary house — white, two-storey, with potted plants in one of the windowsills. Hermione wondered briefly which of them cared for those. There was something incongruous about the idea of Pansy Parkinson gardening, for all that she was named after a flower.

Hermione was stalling.

This was ridiculous. The great Hermione Granger, war hero twice over, rooted in place at the thought of ringing a doorbell. Some hero.

She wasn't sure what it said about her, that it took liquid luck or large amounts of alcohol for her to make a move. Bravery indeed.

They had been back in the present for two days and she hadn't seen either Pansy or Daphne in almost that long. They had technically only been gone two minutes, but that had been enough to ring some pretty big alarm bells up and down the Ministry, and teams of Unspeakables had interviewed all three of them separately, going over everything that had happened, making sure they gave a thorough and detailed account of everything that had happened — dates, places, things they had changed, big and small.

When they had finally let her go, Hermione had felt no small amount of relief. None of the Unspeakables had looked terribly impressed at their "reckless disregard for the laws of time, put in place for very good reasons and by far smarter and wiser minds than yours, Miss Granger," and she had half-expected her brain to end up floating around in a jar somewhere, deep in the Department of Mysteries.

Her relief had been short-lived, however, because no sooner had she got out of one interrogation, she had run straight into another. Harry and Ron were waiting for her outside, and Hermione would have blown them off — because she was exhausted, and her nerves were shot, and she badly needed her bed — except that Ginny was right there, alive and well and looking at her.

So she had gone with them, and told her story, and burst into tears at the sight of Molly Weasley bringing her a cup of tea.

There were many people who had not made it despite their best efforts — Fred, Tonks, Lupin, many others — but Hermione did not dwell on those. She was grateful for the ones who had made it. She would be grateful for that for as long as she lived.

"I'm sorry," Ron said when she was done telling her story. "Can we go back to the part where you slept with Pansy Parkinson and Daphne Greengrass? 'Cause I'm still trying to wrap my head around that one."

Ginny let out a snort of laughter, and Harry threw a cushion at his head, and Hermione rolled her eyes at all three of them, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Merlin, it was good to be home.

That had been the night before, and today she had spent the better part of the day fussing and fidgeting and going crazy, because apparently unless she was in mortal peril she did not know what to do with herself. And it wasn't even that. She had been there before — the adrenaline crash, the struggle to make herself climb down from that state where her fight or flight response was constantly on. It wasn't that.

It was the fact that they were back and she had barely had the time to say two words to Pansy and Daphne, and she didn't know where the three of them were, if anywhere. She didn't know what that thing between them was, or if it even existed anywhere but inside her own head, and part of her didn't even want to find out for sure, in case she didn't like the answer.

But not knowing was driving her crazy.

And that's how she had ended up outside their home that rainy evening, nervous and awkward and frozen in place. Just standing there. Like a stalker. A creepy, creepy stalker.

"Get a grip, Hermione," she muttered under her breath. All the things she'd been through, and this was what scared her? A little rejection wouldn't kill her. Might sting a little, but she'd live.

She forced her legs to cooperate, crossed the street and rang the doorbell before she had time to think better of it. The thirty seconds it took for someone to come to the door were more than enough time for her to regret ever coming here, realise she should at least have been wearing something more flattering, and what the devil had she even been thinking, standing in the rain for so long? Her hair did not need any more incentives to rebel than it already had.

Merlin, she was pathetic.

When Daphne opened the door, the startled look she gave her was enough for Hermione to start regretting several of her life choices, and this one in particular, but then relief spread across Daphne's face and she smiled.

"Thank god," she said, pulling Hermione in for a hug tight enough to hurt, and Hermione wasn't worried anymore.

Pansy was standing on the other end of the corridor, a fond smile on her lips.

"Took you long enough, Granger."

 **The End**


End file.
